Читать книгу Dracula: The Un-Dead - Ian Holt, Dacre Stoker - Страница 15

Inspector Colin Cotford walked along Fenchurch Street, heading toward the heart of Whitechapel. It was the most loathsome place on earth. After thirty years of service with Scotland Yard, Cotford had seen the worst of mankind. He no longer believed in the notions of heaven and hell that he had been taught as a child. He had seen hell on earth, and Whitechapel was it. One of the poorest districts in London’s East End, it attracted the dissolute to its factories in the hope of finding work, but there were more people than there were jobs, which resulted in extreme poverty and overcrowding. The whole district had a distinct odor, a mix of bodily waste, filth, and rotting flesh.

Walking along Commercial Street, Cotford tried not to breathe through his nose, in an attempt to avoid that foul stench. It was early in the morning; daylight was breaking, and vendors were starting to move their fruit, milk, and water wagons toward Covent Garden. A locksmith’s cart clanged past him along the cobbled road. Cotford continued, pretending not to see the crawlers—old women reduced by poverty and vice to the depths of wretchedness. They no longer had the strength to beg for food. Instead, they huddled together for warmth and waited for starvation to end their miserable existence.

Cotford had received an early morning call from the chief superintendent “requesting” that, as soon as possible, he look into the death of some vagabond who had died in Paris. Cotford had spoken to Lieutenant Jourdan, the French police officer assigned to the case, though he did not see the point in this investigation. Crazed, poverty-stricken men were run over by horse and carriages at least a dozen times a day in London. He would have to assume the statistic would be similar in Paris.

But Jourdan appeared to think there was more to the case. The victim had been carrying a silver-plated sword and, according to civic records, had at one time received grants from France for scientific studies. Unlike the Metropolitan Police in London, La Sûreté Nationale in Paris was not municipally operated but rather an agency of the government of France, and they wanted to be certain that Dr. Jack Seward’s death was not the result of foul play.

Cotford had rolled his eyes as he listened to Jourdan prattle on in broken English. The man had seemed to be insinuating the existence of some odd conspiracy and, when Cotford had shown his contempt at such nonsense, had threatened to go over Cotford’s head.

Now Cotford stopped in front of the lodging house opposite the massive warehouse on Wentworth Street. He took a swig from his silver flask for warmth before entering the dilapidated building.

When he’d first joined Scotland Yard, he thought of himself as an Irish bloodhound. In recent years, however, he had felt more like a retriever. By this point in his career, he had expected to be a superintendent, at the very least. He had been, after all, the youngest man to be assigned to work as a detective constable, handpicked twenty-five years ago by the great Inspector Frederick Abberline himself. But Cotford was still only an inspector and still stuck in H division. Instead of sitting in a warm, spacious office in the Norman Shaw buildings of New Scotland Yard, he was fetching facts for useless, dead-end cases.

He entered the stench-filled flat on the top floor. There were no electric lights, and the windows had been boarded up from the inside. Cotford retrieved an electric torch from his coat pocket. Its beam cut through the dusty air and revealed several books scattered about the room. He checked the titles: All were about the occult. Dried garlic cloves and holly leaves were draped around each window frame and door. Artifacts and symbols of dozens of religions hung from the ceiling. Yellowing clippings taken from the London press were stuck in the edges of a mirror, their ink so faded that Cotford, without his reading spectacles, could no longer discern the stories. A rather large insect scurried to escape his torchlight.

Within minutes, Sergeant Lee and two constables arrived to help pack everything up to send to La Sûreté Nationale, France’s equivalent of Scotland Yard.

“Bloody hell,” Lee said when he got his first look at the room. Cotford wasn’t sure if the remark was in reference to the state of the room or the daunting task at hand. As a result of his extraordinary height, Lee kept hitting his head on the various artifacts hanging from the ceiling, causing them to sway like a ghastly parody of Christmas tinsel.

Sergeant Lee looked up to Cotford with a sort of hero worship because the old inspector had at one time worked on the most notorious case in Scotland Yard’s history. The publicity surrounding the case had given Cotford some notoriety. Unfortunately, since the case was never solved, it was also Cotford’s biggest failure and had tarnished his reputation within his profession as well as in the public’s eye. He felt that Lee’s admiration of him was unwarranted. He could see great promise in the sergeant, and hoped Lee would achieve the success that had eluded him. Unlike himself, Lee was a family man. Other than that, the inspector knew very little of Lee’s personal life, and Cotford preferred it that way.

The beam from Cotford’s torch illuminated walls that were wallpapered with torn pages of the Bible. The light caught a hint of red on the far wall. Cotford stepped closer. Scrawled in what appeared to be blood were the words Vivus est.

“Mad as a March hare,” Lee said, shaking his head in disbelief. “What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure, lad,” Cotford replied. “I think it’s Latin.”

Cotford picked up a leather-bound book, blew the dust off, and opened it. A photograph fell from beneath its cover. Lee picked it up as Cotford flipped through the hand-scrawled pages. Turning the picture over, Lee showed the inscription to Cotford: Lucy Westenra, my love, June 1887. Cotford shook his head. Nothing of interest. Lee tossed the picture into a box that one of the constables had started to pack for shipment to Paris.

Cotford closed the book and was about to follow suit, but something struck a familiar nerve. He couldn’t believe what he had glanced at within the book’s pages. He wondered if being back in Whitechapel was causing his mind to play tricks on him.

“What is it, sir?” Lee asked.

Cotford reopened the book, found the page again, and reread the passage. There it was in black and white. Could it be true? He tapped his finger on the page and, without looking down, recited the words already etched in his memory, “It was the professor who lifted his surgical saw and began severing Lucy’s limbs from her body.”

Cotford dashed back to the box and scooped out the picture of Lucy Westenra. He paused for a moment, mourning a girl he did not even know. Even after all this time, he still blamed himself and thought, as Karl Marx once said, The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.

A second more and he was racing for the door. “Finish packing the rest of those diaries and follow me with that crate straightaway, Sergeant Lee.”

Within the hour, Cotford and Lee were back on the Victoria Embankment. They arrived at the Gothic red-and-white-bricked building of New Scotland Yard. Without saying a word, they made their way down to the Records Room, also known as “the other morgue,” to search the files.

Hours later, they were losing steam.

“Where the blazes are those files?” Cotford swore.

“Some seem to be missing, sir.”

“I can see that! Why are they missing? The entire case should be displayed in the lobby to remind us all of our folly.”

“Begging your pardon, sir. But that case was at the Whitehall office.”

“I know it was at the Whitehall office. I worked on the damned case.”

“Well, when we moved from Scotland Yard to this building, the files…not all the files were moved. Some are unaccounted for.”

Cotford growled, “That case was a blemish on this institution, and it’s haunted me like the plague. If anyone hears we’ve misplaced the files, we’ll never live it down.”

“Here’s something, sir.” Lee pulled out a tall black cardboard file box. The edges were frayed, and the box itself was held together with a red ribbon. Cotford recognized it immediately. He took the box from Lee as if it were a priceless antique. The label, now yellowed with age, was still firmly gummed on. In typed lettering, it read, whitechapel murders, 1888. Beneath, in Cotford’s own handwriting, the file number: 57825.

Under that: jack the ripper.

From August 31, 1888, to November 9, 1888, London had been in the grip of terror as five women were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel district by an unknown assailant. The killer had never been caught. He would strike in the night and disappear without a trace. This was the infamous case on which Abberline, the lead investigator, promoted the promising young Constable Cotford so he might join the investigation. Cotford’s beat was the H division—Whitechapel—and, with his many commendations, Cotford was the obvious choice. It was the greatest regret in Cotford’s life that on one fateful night he had failed to apprehend the killer by mere inches. On September 30, Cotford had happened upon the scene in Dutfield’s Yard where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was murdered. Cotford had seen a dark figure fleeing the scene, leaving a trail of blood for him to follow. He had blown his whistle to summon the other police officers and gave chase. But when he’d neared the fleeing suspect, Cotford had tripped on a curb he hadn’t seen in the fog that rolled in each night off the river. When Cotford picked himself up, he had lost sight of his suspect and was unable to see anything past his nose. He had even found himself lost in the streets, unable to find his way back to the scene of Stride’s death.

The night ended with another murder. The fourth victim was discovered in Mitre Square, a mere stone’s throw from where Cotford had tripped. When he fell, so had his career. If only he had been more careful, he could have been known as the man who apprehended Jack the Ripper. How different his life would have been! He would never admit to Abberline that he had fallen. Cotford idolized the great detective and was afraid of losing his respect. Something told him that Abberline knew, or at the very least suspected, that he was hiding something, but it didn’t stop him from standing by Cotford and the rest of the investigating officers when the public wanted to lynch them all for their seeming incompetence. This selfless act by Abberline meant nothing to the public and probably even hastened the great man’s fall within the Yard, but it meant the world to his men.

Cotford felt as if he were going back in time as he pulled out the file folders containing the transcripts of suspect interviews. Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, a Russian doctor, also used the alias Count Luiskovo. At the time of the murder of the fifth victim, Mary Jane Kelly, Dr. Pedachenko had been a patient in the Whitby Asylum, so Abberline had ruled him out as a suspect.

Cotford opened another file, marked confidential. Upon opening it, he remembered why it was marked as such; the suspect was Dr. William Gull.

“Dr. Gull? The Queen’s personal physician?” Lee asked, reading over his shoulder.

“The very same,” Cotford said. “We were secretly investigating a lead that went dead. In 1888, Dr. Gull was seventy years old and had suffered a stroke. He was mostly paralyzed on the left side. Definitely not the one I was chasing that night.”

“What night?”

Cotford ignored the question. He pulled out another file. This is it! His chance at redemption. Fate had dealt him a new hand. He was so thrilled that he started to laugh.

Lee was cautious of Cotford’s uncharacteristically ebullient behavior. “I don’t understand, sir.”

Cotford didn’t need Lee to understand. The dream of exposing the identity of Jack the Ripper and bringing him to justice was at last within his grasp. The professor Seward wrote of in his journal was indeed the same man who was one of Abberline’s prime suspects. Though he had never discovered any evidence to place this suspect at any of the crime scenes, his gruesome biography did not allow for a complete dismissal of suspicion. The suspect in question was a disgraced professor and doctor. He possessed great surgical skills and had lost both his medical license and his university tenure due to performing experimental medical procedures on his patients and stealing university cadavers for heinous, ritual-inspired mutilations.

Cotford triumphantly handed this deranged suspect’s folder to his second. “Mark my words. Every dog has his day.”

Sergeant Lee looked at Cotford with confusion before reading aloud the name on the suspect’s file folder: DR. ABRAHAM VAN HELSING.